Blood and Belonging

by Michael Ignatieff

  At first the destruction appears to have no rhyme or reason. In some villages, not a wall has been left unsprayed with bullets, while in others, scarcely a house has been touched. After a while, you begin to work like an archaeologist, sifting through the clues to discern a pattern to what must have happened. There appear to be three typical forms of destruction. The most surgical form is dynamiting: the houses are collapsed in neat piles, with minimal damage to the houses next door. Families were driven out by their neighbors or by paramilitary militias and their homes were blown up. Many of these dynamited piles appear to have once been large, recently constructed houses, and it makes you wonder how many years of a man’s or woman’s life as a Gastarbeiter in a German automobile factory went into this, only to see it fall like a pack of cards.

  The second type of destruction appears to have been accomplished by artillery fire, from the Yugoslav National Army guns that punched round, tire-sized holes in Croatian village walls. The third type of destruction is firebombing, which leaves fire marks on all the windows, and which would have been the work of marauding paramilitaries on both sides.

  Some houses were daubed by the Serbs with the slogan “U’ for “Ustashe,” which then marked them for ethnic cleansing. Others are marked with crudely and rapidly painted names of those who lived in them, as if, as they were abandoned, their inhabitants were hoping to remind the defenders that they belonged to the same side. I spent hours in these ruins, the dust in my throat, the sound of broken glass under my feet,deciphering the clues to the shape of catastrophe.

  Never say ethnic cleansing is just racial hatred run wild, just Balkan madness. For there is a deep logic to it. By 1990, this part of Yugoslavia was a Hobbesian world: No one in these villages could be sure who would protect them. If they were Serbs and someone attacked them and they went to the Croatian police, would the Croats protect them? If they were Croats, in a Serbian village, could they be protected against a nighttime attack from a Serbian paramilitary team, usually led by a former policeman? This is how ethnic cleansing began to acquire its logic. If you can’t trust your neighbors, drive them out. If you can’t live among them, live only among your own. This alone appeared to offer people security. This alone gave respite from the fear that leaped like a brushfire from house to house.

  The West has to make up its mind about the emerging order of ethnically cleansed microstates that have taken the place of Yugoslavia. Nobody in the West wants to appear to be condoning ethnic cleansing, but every day, every hour, civilians are fleeing war zones, or being driven thence by men with guns, into the relative safety of their own ethnic enclaves. Ethnic apartheid may be an abomination, but for the more than two million refugees who have fled or been driven from their homes, apartheid is the only guarantee of safety they are prepared to trust. Civilian victims in the area are rightly indifferent to our scruples and our strictures about ethnic cantonment. For the West failed to save Sarajevo, where Muslim, Croat, and Serb lived together in peace for centuries. It is asking the impossible to believe that ordinary people will trickle back to the multi-ethnic villages they have left behind, simply in order to vindicate our liberal principles.

  As you travel through the zones of devastation in central Croatia, you also have the impression that you have fallen through some hole in time and are spinning backward into the past. You are not in 1993 but in 1943. In Serb villages, old ladies in black scarves and black wool dresses watch you suspiciously as you pass; ribbed hay carts go by, driven by old men in their Second World War khaki forage caps. Out in their back gardens, women are bending over their hoes. On the roads, militiamen, wearing the red, white, and blue shoulder badge of the Serbian Krajina, emerge from dugouts by the road to stop the car and search you. Everyone is wary. Few will talk.

  In one ruined farm, formerly inhabited by Croatians, I came upon an old Serbian couple camped out in the remains of an out-building. They were in their eighties, and they had been driven from their home in Daruvar, forty kilometers to the north, by the Croatians. The old man was sawing up a piece of charred wood for the stove. The old lady was tidying up their tiny room, with its bed, its cracked window, table, two cups and two chairs, and spotlessly swept floor. They had rebuilt the roof themselves, and they survived on what they got from neighbors and the Red Cross. We sit on a stump, in the middle of the ruins, with glass, brick, and burned roof beams littered about, and when I ask them whether this war has been worse than the last one, the old lady replies, with bitter scorn, that this one has been much worse. “In the last one, we all fought the Germans. This time, there was just betrayal.” Neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend. Can you ever live together again? They both shake their heads and look away.

  When I ask them how they manage to survive, they suddenly seem to revive. “God will arrange everything,” they both say, in unison, exchanging a cheerful glance across what must be fifty years of marriage. When I get up to leave, the old man takes my hand and holds it in a long, intense grip. His bright blue eyes stare deep into mine. “Truth and national rights. That is all we want. Truth and national rights.”

  A mile away, across another checkpoint, this time in the Croatian village of Lipik, I come across a man helping a team of six women in blue overalls to stack up the usable bricks from the rubble of a flattened house. It turns out that he is the owner of the house, and the women are from a municipal detachment sent out to repair damaged houses.

  Tomislav Mareković is the man’s name, Yup to his friends. Yup is the caretaker in the local hospital and a trainer of the local football team in his spare time. I suspect, without knowing for sure, that he also is a prominent local supporter of the HDZ, the ruling Croatian party. Why else, I reason, is his the only house I can find in Lipik where the rubble is being cleared by a municipal work detail?

  He shows me where his kitchen was, where the television set used to be, where his couch stood. Now there is nothing left but the foundations and a mound of bricks which the women are stacking in piles after chipping away the mortar. Next door’s house was untouched. Why? I ask. Serbs, he says. We always got on. Now, he says, they are in West Germany. And the house next door? My parents’, he says laconically. Suddenly he points out into the street. “That is where they left my father. There, in the street, for three weeks, before someone buried the body. And my mother, they took her to a barn and set her on fire.”

  Yugoslav army tanks, dug into the hills above Lipik, were pounding the town and, under directions from local Serbian paramilitaries, were targeting Croat houses. When Yup’s house came under bombardment, he and his wife jumped in their car and fled to Zagreb, but his parents refused to come, thinking they would be safe. Days later, they were dragged out of their house by Serbian paramilitaries, possibly from the same village. They were shot and their bodies were burned. Yup tells me all this with a few sighs, a few pauses to light a cigarette, staring glumly into the distance. All the while, the women work silently around us, stacking bricks.

  Yup declares a break and I sit down with the women at a trestle table in his tiny back garden. I want to know why the work detail is all-female, and they all reply, with much laughter and winking, “Because women are the best.” Left unsaid is the fact that so many Croatian males are away serving in the army. I tell them that I’ve noticed on the other side the Serbs aren’t rebuilding. They’re just living in the ruins, with their guns trained toward Croatia, waiting. “They’re not rebuilding,” says one lady, matter-of-factly, “because they know they’re done for.” Some of the other ladies nod, while others look down silently at the table.

  Yup says. “Three of you are Serbs, isn’t that right?” And three of the women beside me nod and look back down at the table. In the silence, they leave it to me to figure out how it comes about that three Serbian women are helping to rebuild a Croat’s house. It can only be because they were married to Croats, have lived here all their lives, and find themselves now torn in two, as their village is. Then the Serbian woman beside me slowly
begins to cry and a stillness descends over everyone. The Croatian women across the table look at her dispassionately, while she crumples into herself. “Cry, girl, cry,” says one, and reaches over and takes her hand.

  WARLORDS

  Back in 1989, we thought the new world opened up by the breaching of the Berlin Wall would be ruled by philosopher-kings, dissident heroes, and shipyard electricians. We looked forward to a new order of nation-states, released from the senile grip of the Soviets. We assumed that national self-determination had to mean freedom and that nationalism had to mean nation building. As usual, we were wrong. We hoped for order. We got pandemonium. In the name of nationalism, dozens of viable nation-states have been shattered beyond repair. In the name of state building, we have returned large portions of Europe to the pre-political chaos prior to the emergence of the modern state.

  Large portions of the former Yugoslavia are now ruled by figures that have not been seen in Europe since late medieval times: the warlords. They appear wherever nation-states disintegrate: in Lebanon, Somalia, northern India, Armenia, Georgia, Ossetia, Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia. With their car phones, faxes, and exquisite personal weaponry, they look postmodern, but the reality is pure medieval.

  Their vehicle of choice is a four-wheel-drive Cherokee Chief, with a policeman’s blue light on the roof to flash when speeding through a checkpoint. They pack a pistol but they don’t wave it about. They leave vulgar intimidation to the bodyguards in the back of the jeep, the ones with shades, designer jeans, and Zastava machine pistols. They themselves dress in the leather jackets, floral ties, and pressed corduroy trousers favored by German television producers. They bear no resemblance whatever to Rambo. The ones I began meeting at the checkpoints on the roads leading off from the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity were short,stubby men who in a former life had been small-time hoods, small-town cops, or both. Spend a day with them, touring their world and you’d hardly know that most of them are serial killers.

  Warlords not only dominate the war zones, but have worked their way to the heart of power in the authoritarian single-party states of Croatia and Serbia alike.

  War criminals are celebrities in the Balkans. They have seats in the Serbian Parliament. One of them, VojislavŠešelj, the self-styled Duke of the Serbian Chetniks, runs his own party as well as a full-time paramilitary unit. Another,Željko Raznjatović, a.k.a. Arkan, controls an eight-hundred-strong paramilitary unit called the Tigers, who raped and tortured their way through eastern Slavonia in the Croatian war of 1991. This odious thug, on the run from an Interpol warrant for an attempted murder in Sweden, is a parliamentary deputy and operates a number of immensely profitable sanctions-busting businesses, including selling smuggled petrol for hard currency at petrol stations around Belgrade. Ever the postmodern Prince of Darkness, Arkan has launched himself into celebrity franchising. In Serbian farmhouses in eastern Slavonia, the icon you are most likely to see beside an image of Saint Sava is a large colored calendar with a different picture of Arkan for every month of the year.

  At anti-Milošević demonstrations in Belgrade, which I attended at the end of my journey, who should appear, cruising through the middle of the crowd in his Cherokee Chief, but this smiling killer in a smart sheepskin jacket, waving suavely to left and right, obviously reveling in his provocation of Belgrade’s impotent peace party.

  Croatians will tell you that the fact that Arkan is allowed to serve as a deputy in the Serbian Parliament is proof that Serbia is a fascist regime. It is not. There are functioning opposition parties and newspapers, and, indeed, just as much democracy in Belgrade as there is in Zagreb. It is Djilas’s characterization of Serbian politics—“democracy with a tinge of banditism”—that best describes the way warlords have worked their way into the heart of the system.

  There are warlords on the Croatian side, too—if not in Zagreb, then in the front-line towns like Osijek, run by town council president and local party boss Branimir Glavaš. When you tour the town in Glavaš’s jeep, it is like being with a spectacularly popular local politician in a small American town. He comes across a local wedding and the band serenades him. The bridegroom asks him to kiss the bride; the revelers hand him bottles to sample. It is hard to remember that this man is leader of the Glavaš Unit, a paramilitary group held responsible not merely for the defense of Osijek but for the cleansing of Serbian villages and for the murder of Croatian policemen who sought to maintain good relations with Serbs.

  Glavaš flashes a policeman’s badge at the police checkpoints, as well as a military pass at the front line. The limits of his power are as imprecise as they are pervasive. He has translated the nefarious glamour of the warlord into peacetime power, yet he assures you with a snap of his fingers that he could remobilize his paramilitaries overnight. Thirty kilometers away, across the front line in Serb-held Vukovar, there is Mr. Kojić, the Serbian equivalent of Mr. Glavaš. Same jeep, same courteous manner. Same guns.

  The warlords are nationalists, but their convictions are uninteresting. They are technicians of violence, rather than ideologues. Earlier than everybody else, they understood that ethnic nationalism had delivered the ordinary people of the Balkans straight back to the pre-political state of nature, where, as Hobbes predicted, life is nasty, brutish, and short. In the state of nature, the man with a Zastava machine pistol and a Cherokee Chief is king. For he can provide the two commodities everybody here craves: security and vengeance.

  Once the Yugoslav Communist state began to spin apart into its constituent national particles, the key questions soon became: Will the local Croat policemen protect me if I am a Serb? Will I keep my job in the soap factory if my new boss is a Serb or a Muslim? The answer to these questions was no, because no state remained to enforce the old inter-ethnic bargain. As a result, every individual rushed, pell-mell, to the next available source of protection: the warlord.

  For the warlord not only offers protection. He offers a solution. He tells his people: If we cannot trust our neighbors, we must rid ourselves of them. If we cannot live together in a single state, we must create clean states of our own. The logic of ethnic cleansing is not just motivated by nationalist hatred. Cleansing is the warlord’s coldly rational solution to the war of all against all. Rid yourself of your neighbors, the warlord says, and you no longer have to fear them. Live among your own, and you can live in peace. With me and my boys to protect you.

  VUKOVAR

  After dark in Vukovar, your car headlights range over pock-marked walls, roofless ruins, and piles of rubble on both sides of the road. You do not stop at the bullet-shredded STOP signs because there are no cars at the crossroads. People must be living here, because you occasionally see a solitary light gleaming from behind a shutter in one of the bombed-out tower blocks. But you see no one because no one ventures out after dark. Rats scuttle to and fro across the road to forage in the garbage. In the distance, you hear an occasional burst of small-arms fire.

  This ghost town was once a Habsburg episcopal seat on the Danube. In 1991, it became the Croatian Stalingrad. Throughout the autumn, the Croatian national guard defended it to the last street against the heaviest artillery bombardment seen in Europe since 1945. When the Serbian paramilitaries and the Yugoslav National Army finally “liberated” the town in November 1991, at a cost of something like nine thousand lives, there was nothing left to liberate but a devastated ruin.

  The self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina has its eastern headquarters in Vukovar. “Krajina” means the military frontier. Serbian settlement in Croatia was established in the seventeenth century by the Austro-Hungarians as a buffer zone between them and the Ottomans. As the appointed defenders of European civilization against the Turks in the Balkans, the Serbs have always gone armed. The gun culture here is ancestral.

  In the town square, a banner has been stretched over the road from one pulverized house to another. It reads: “Welcome to Vukovar, Year One.” But, eighteen months after entering the town, the Serbs have don
e nothing to rebuild it. It should probably be left as it is. UNESCO could fence it off and declare it a European heritage site. What could be more European, after all, than our tradition of senseless nationalist warfare?

  The Serbs have taken down the Croatian street signs and replaced them with Serbian ones in Cyrillic, but the Croatian signs are still stacked in the attic of the pulverized town museum, as if somewhere in their minds the Serbs expect that the Croatian signs will one day go back up again.

  In the museum attic, too, is a still more extraordinary sight: three bronze busts—Marx, Engels, and Lenin—sitting on the main roof beam, dispatched there in the 1980s at the official death of Communist ideology, and now revealed by the bombardment that blew away all the roof tiles and the false ceiling concealing the roof beams. These three bronze busts were the only exhibit in the museum to have survived the siege intact.

  While the responsibility for the destruction of Vukovar lies squarely with the tanks and artillery of the Yugoslav National Army which lobbed 150,000 shells into the place, the Croatians also appear to have dynamited parts of it as they withdrew, so that the Serbs would gain nothing but rubble for their pains. The pulverization of Vukovar made no military sense. When I asked a Serbian tank commander why they had done it, he shrugged his shoulders. “War has many such tragedies … Leningrad … Stalingrad …” But these were battles with a military objective. In a nationalist war, on the other hand, military objectives were driven by a desire to hurt, humiliate, and punish. The JNA (Yugoslav National Army) could have bypassed Vukovar and sent its tank columns down the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity all the way to Zagreb. Instead, it sat on the other side of the Danube and pounded Vukovar into rubble, as if to say, with each outgoing shell, “So you want to be independent, do you? This is what it will cost you, and what you will have at the end of it is nothing but ruins.”